A Complex Crossroads

In Los Angeles, a regenerative art installation cleans stormwater runoff.

A Daily Dose of Green

Louisville's Green Heart Project conducts a clinical trial in which nature is the drug.

A New Plan for Public Toilets Shows Promise

An innovative plan would replace some street parking spaces with environmentally friendly public restrooms — facilities that do not flush or connect to the sewer system. Instead, human waste would be collected and someday possibly composted to add back into the ecosystem as plant fertilizer.

Ambitious Louisville study seeks to understand impact of trees on our health

Trees can add beauty and serenity to a neighborhood -- but can they also improve the health of its residents? In Kentucky, the University of Louisville ...

Artist Spotlight: Hyphae Design Laboratory

Oakland-based Hyphae Design Laboratory brings us into their lab and the 'Pprophet' installation they created for Bay Area Now 8, YBCA's eighth triennial of Bay Area contemporary art.

Bay Meadows

A colorful vertical garden greets guests at the Bay Meadows Welcome Center, inviting passersby to pause for a moment and enjoy the landscape. The vibrant stretch of greenery flows ...

Berkeley Wash

Hyphae delivered an integrated multi-prong strategy to maintaining sanitation services to the people of Berkeley. A baseline model includes the management and maintenance of infras ...

Berkeley wants input on its public restrooms

The city is conducting a study and holding public meetings to evaluate current conditions and future needs.

Block By Block

Block by Block, San Francisco’s third Living Innovation Zone was a temporary kinetic installation composed of blocks of milled urban timber and illuminated plastic. The elemental f ...

Broadway Master Plan

Hyphae Design Laboratory is working with a national team led by Gresham Smith to develop a master plan for Broadway, one of Louisville’s most important east-west connectors and a c ...

California Academy of Sciences

Creating the 2.2 acre living roof on the California Academy of Sciences, situated in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, was a major collaborative effort. Acting on behalf of Montere ...

Cleaning the Air through Ecosystem Interventions

Traffic sourced air pollution is a major contributor to human disease, with children and the elderly being most vulnerable to its toxic effects!!

Copal Tree Lodge

The Belcampo agritourism facility aims to be a flagship model for highly sustainable, fully integrated organic rum, chocolate and coffee production, in which every step of the proc ...

Esalen Guest Units

Esalen Lodge

Hyphae is serving as the civil engineer and landscape architect for two Esalen Projects, first of which is the renovation and remodel of the Main Lodge & Restaurant. The steep clif ...

Esalen South Coast

Hyphae is also working as the civil engineer and landscape architect for the development of Esalen's 70 unit worker housing complex. With half of worker housing being destroyed by ...

Field Semester

Foundry III

Green for Good

Louisville Metro Government’s Office of Sustainability and its partners embarked on an exciting project called Green for Good: to strategically unite interrelated sustainability ef ...

Greenheart

Hyphae Design Laboratory is working with the University of Louisville’s Envirome Institute, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), National Institute of Health (NIH), Washington University, ...

Mirasol Muti-Family Apartment Complex

Mirasol Mixed Use is a 89-unit Multifamily apartment complex located in Santa Barbara, CA. Hyphae joined the design team, utilizing our interdisciplinary strengths to take on...

Montgomery Residence

Hyphae provided living wall and recirculating water systems design and engineering for an indoor living wall. Our client shared an interest gaining creating an alcove beside the bu ...

Net Zero Distillery

Belcampo is a California-based food company that focuses on vertically integrated sustainable food production. Their Ranch, Slaughterhouse and Meat Stores, have launched to wild su ...

Oakland Gateway

Hyphae Design Lab is the lead architect and landscape architect in designing a site plan for OMSS. Under the approved Master Plan for redevelopment of the former Oakland Army Base ...

PPlanter 1.0

Hyphae Design Laboratory together with The North of Market/Tenderloin Community Benefit District (NOMTL-CBD) has embarked on a campaign to improve access to public bathrooms. The e ...

PPlanter 2.0

Situated in a single parking space at 357 Ellis St. between Jones St. and Taylor St., the latest PPlanter trial (with the new and improved PPlanter 2.0) ran from July 12th to July ...

PPlanter 3.0

The PPlanter works for both men and women. Similar to a parklet, it conveniently takes up a single parking space. The PPlanter system works as follows: a sink is supplied with a hu ...

Pier 27 Challenge

Hyphae was asked by GOOD Magazine and the Port of San Francisco to envision a new life for Pier 27 + 29, an awkward shaped triangular pier that juts out beyond all other piers. The ...

Pprophet

We all poop and pee every day and therefore, our discarded excrement is also our great social equalizer. Now, in a time when San Francisco is so economically divided and the world ...

Public PPlanter Urinal Doubles as a Bamboo Garden in San Francisco

When most people hear the term public urinal, it’s often accompanied by horrifying images and the recollection of an equally unpleasant smell. In an attempt to change people’s perception of these waste receptacles, California’s Hyphae Design Laboratory developed the PPlanter...

Public sanitation and pandemics, not just an 18th-century problem

Sanitation is one of the most important medical advances of the 20th Century, but we take it for granted. Public Sanitation not only makes us healthier, day to day and in the face of pandemics, but it also address a deep need for justice. .

Rees

Riverside Roundabout

The Riverside Roundabout is a $40 million bridge renovation spanning the LA River between the 5 and 110 freeways. This will be the first roundabout in the city of LA, designed in a ...

SFMOMA

Hyphae Design Laboratory in collaboration with Habitat Horticulture are designing a 5000 s.f. living wall for the new SFMOMA expansion, designed by Snohetta. The living walls will ...

SITE Santa Fe - 2014 Biennial Pavilion Competition

Hyphae's Waterscape design earned runner-up for SITE Santa Fe's Call for Architects and Designers. Waterscape is a unique commentary on Santa Fe's desert landscape and rail history ...

SOAK

San Francisco Residence

For a new residence on a very steep site on top of bedrock without infiltration, we were caught between a rock and a hard place, literally! With this difficult situation, we were a ...

San Francisco's Plan for Turning Parking Spaces Into Public Toilets

An innovative plan would replace some street parking spaces with environmentally friendly public restrooms -- facilities that do not flush or connect to the sewer system.

Showers on Wheels

This past fall, a project started called (Human) Wasteland, which maps reports of human waste throughout the city of San Francisco.

Solving the Public Poop Problem

San Francisco considers a plan for cheap public toilets that compost

Station A

Our founder’s nonprofit, Urban Biofilter, was awarded a Proposition 84 Urban Greening Grant funded by the State of California Strategic Growth Council to develop Adapt Oakland. We ...

The Harmony Building

The Harmony project is a renovation and adaptive re-use of a historic building in downtown Louisville into a living laboratory; the intent is to create a vibrant urban ecosystem wh ...

The messy science of clean air

Sometime you have to get your hands messy, or the whole studio. This is how hot wax, a kitchen hand mixer, a suitcase stuffed with leaves, and dried instant noodles help Kentuckians breathe healthier air

Toilet? Planter? Urinal uses bamboo to deal with waste

It is almost impossible to find a public toilet in the US – and that creates problems. When desperate people pee in doorways and alleys, it offends residents and drives customers away from local businesses.

Two Bunch Palms

Two Bunch Palms is a historic hot springs in Southern California. Hyphae was hired to develop a Masterplan to renovate and significantly expand the aging resort and infrastructure...

UC Berkeley Blue Oak Ranch Reserve

Hyphae Design Laboratory provided site planning and civil engineering work for the UC-Berkeley owned Blue Oak Ranch Reserve, a 3,259 acre ecologically protected reserve located eas ...

UCSD Revelle

Working with the project architects, Hyphae designed the grading and stormwater strategies for dealing with both on-site water management as well as a flash flood stormwater manage ...

Urban Biofilter

Founding principal of Hyphae, Brent Bucknum, also started a West Oakland based non-profit called Urban Biofilter (UB), which works to advocate, research, and design for a variety...

Waldorf High School

Waterman Gardens

Hyphae completed the Master planning and Entitlement phases for the conversion of a San Bernardino Army Base into a 400 unit LEED Platinum affordable housing development. Proposed ...